Citroën were up against a deadline. With a new car launch coming and a site that needed an overhaul, they turned to Cognizant Microsoft Business Group (formerly New Signature).
Citroën UK Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of PSA Peugeot Citroën (PSA) and is the UK importer of Citroën cars and light commercial vehicles. Supplying a full range of passenger cars, Citroën is a major player in the UK market with a market share of between 4-5% (5-6% in the retail market), ranking them well inside the top 10 manufacturers.
Citroën prides itself on delivering cars that are “alive with technology”. Unfortunately, their national website didn’t say the same to consumers. Having completed their new website design, they were now looking for implementation on a scalable and robust platform.
Cognizant Microsoft Business Group were asked to undertake the technical implementation of this new design, removing all the manual product data entry requirements. We were to design and build a MOSS 2007 WCM solution to integrate Citroën’s website directly with their parent company’s European-wide central database and to design, specify and manage a high-performance infrastructure for it to run on.
The challenge was having it ready in record time for a product launch. Citroën’s management team wanted a partner with a demonstrated track record of delivering high-quality solutions with a rapid turnaround. Cognizant Microsoft Business Group’s Agile approach was particularly appealing due to the lack of a completed functional spec and the lack of time to finish it. Working with Citroën and PSA the site was delivered ready for the C5 launch in a record-breaking three months.
Throughout the development process, the client met the nine Cognizant Microsoft Business Group developers working on the project every day. Together, they reviewed the code iterations and discussed customisations to ensure minimum re-works and quick turnaround. Using MOSS 2007 Citroën were able to leverage the latest technology, including ASP.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and SQL Server 2005. Use of these products speeded up development and allowed the accelerated timeline.
The site has proved a worthy replacement to the old, with customers commenting that it is much more responsive: content updates take half the time they took before. In fact, the rich user interface and improved speed have improved the user experience so much that the number of site visitors has increased by 27 percent.
